Champions Trophy no longer serves a purpose
Matthew Hayden had recently suggested that the Champions Trophy should be scrapped in order to make room in the packed international calendar
Nishi Narayanan
25-Feb-2013
Matthew Hayden had recently suggested that the Champions Trophy should be scrapped in order to make room in the packed international calendar. Suresh Menon agrees and writes in his dreamcricket.com column that while at one point it was significant, it longer serves a purpose.
When Jagmohan Dalmiya was President of the ICC, he mooted the idea of what was then known as the ‘mini-World Cup’ in 1998 for two very good reasons. The World Cup was not yet an ICC event, and the plan was to make some money for the governing body which would own the new tournament. There was too the noble idea of spreading the game beyond the Test-playing countries. Thus Dhaka and Nairobi played hosts, but by 2002, that ideal was abandoned when the tournament was held in Sri Lanka and then in England. By 1999, the World Cup became an ICC tournament, after it had previously been managed by the respective host countries. Television rights had made the pocket money the ICC earned from the Champions Trophy irrelevant. Twice in recent years, the Champions Trophy was held just five months before a World Cup. It was like going through the motions to satisfy the international calendar.
Nishi Narayanan is a staff writer at ESPNcricinfo